Efforts to improve the preservation, searchability, and discoverability of research data are a priority. To facilitate these efforts in cell electrophysiology and biophysics we propose that ontologies be used to design and annotate data, as they provide a substantive metadata structure, with reasoned definitions arranged in a logical, hierarchal structure where the meaning of data are unambiguously assigned. We illustrate this by describing our cell electrophysiology data with an ontology. We then make this hierarchal structure with definitions the basis of the data architecture which is implemented upon transforming the data into the storage format: Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5).